Conclusions

By the mid-twelfth century, the advocates of Church reform had won at least partial victories on all of the major issues they raised. Canon law by 1140 was becoming a juristic system of greater effectiveness and sophistication than it had been a century or so earlier, when Burchard of Worms compiled his De­cretum.

The law of marriage and divorce in the legislation and canonical collections of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries gave primacy to the doctrine of indissolubility, save under exceptional circumstances. Divorce and remarriage were permitted only where a party to the first marriage proved impotent, where the original marriage seriously infringed the rules on consanguinity or affinity, and under some circumstances where one party was guilty of adultery. Exogamy and indissolubility clearly emerged as hallmarks of Catholic marriage during this period and the papacy and the Church’s courts both worked dili­gently to implement these ideals. As a consequence the laity, even at the high­est social levels, lost much of its former control over the marriages of family members. The old-style capacity of families to arrange the marriages, divorces, and remarriages of their members was rapidly disappearing by the 1120s and 1130s. Polygyny, too, was by now no longer common in Christian Europe, and, although concubinage among the laity was by no means rare, these unions were less common and subject to greater social disapproval than they previously had been.

The canonists of this period maintained, as did their predecessors, the Church’s right to limit the sexual practices of married persons.

Reform canonists regarded all nonmarital sex as criminal and subject to pun­ishment. Church law in the early twelfth century became increasingly inter­ested in penalizing nonmarital sex, although the effectiveness of its interven­tion was limited by its rudimentary enforcement system. Notorious sex crimes were occasionally prosecuted, but the Church had yet to develop an effective system for detecting and arraigning routine offenders. Moreover, the Church’s leaders in this period were prepared to tolerate, if not to approve, some kinds of extramarital sex, particularly prostitution and other casual sexual liaisons. A few reformers, notably Peter Damian, urged vigorous action against “un­natural” sex offenders, but this campaign failed to become an important focus of reform activity.

Reformers devoted their most strenuous efforts in the field of sex law to im­posing mandatory celibacy upon the clergy. At the beginning of this period, earlier pronouncements about clerical celibacy remained ineffective; many, probably most, of the Catholic clergy were married or living in some type of relatively stable concubinage. By 1140 this picture had begun to change.^[905] New laws against clerical marriage, particularly the canons of the first and second Lateran Councils, meant that clerics could no longer contract legally valid mar­riages. Certainly this did not stop many churchmen from attempting to do so, but their illicit marriages, if challenged, were almost certain to be pronounced void, and public opinion no longer accepted married clerics as willingly as it had done two or three generations earlier.

Changes in actual behavior occurred much more slowly, of course, than changes in the law. Repeated denunciations by local and regional synods of clerical concubinage and incontinence indicate that compliance with the new law was haphazard, particularly in rural areas where authorities visited infre­quently, and among the lower clergy, where official vigilance was often lax.^[906] Scofflaw clerics who ignored or flouted the law did exist, but the few who made it into the record almost certainly constituted only a fraction of those who failed to conform to the new discipline.^[907] Gradually, however, celibacy became the norm, particularly among the higher clergy. Bishops who were married or who lived in open concubinage, for example, were becoming rare in many places by the mid-twelfth century.^[908]

These changes in the church’s marriage and sex laws during the reform era had far-reaching implications for social structure. Under legal pressure mar­riages became more stable and exogamy more common, while the church’s law­givers pressed increasingly to promote freedom of contract as another essential feature of Christian marriage. Although nonmarital sex continued to be com­mon, the canon law made it increasingly hazardous. And the sexual relation­ships of the clergy, as we have seen, were radically transformed as a result of the reformers’ struggles on behalf of mandatory celibacy. The net result was to restrict the marriage options and to reshape the marriage strategics of a signifi­cant part of the population. As marriage became easier to contract (a long-term result of the canonists’ emphasis on freedom to choose marriage partners), as the role of parents and family heads in arranging marriages decreased, as the ban on endogamy became increasingly rigorous, as divorce became more re­stricted, and as the clergy ceased to be acceptable marriage partners for women who had other options, the marriage market became more restricted.

These developments also prepared the ground for further changes, notably the emergence among elite groups during this period of increasing identifica­tion of the family with the paternal lineage, rather than the bilalteral identifica­tion with both maternal and paternal kin common in earlier generations. From the late eleventh century the male line of descent becomes the primary factor in defining family relationships among the elite. In consequence wives and daughters become increasingly marginal members of the family, since they no longer transmited its identity to the next generation.^[909]

Changes in marriage law and social practice, combined with changes in population densities and settlement patterns, altered the choices that people made when arranging their lives. Population expansion and increasing concen­tration of population in towns, combined with an extended ban on endogamy, encouraged the growth of prostitution, particularly as men became more cau­tious in choosing their wives because they could no longer easily divorce them if they made an unfortunate or impolitic choice. Men of wealth and social posi­tion may have found it possible, even desirable, to postpone marriage, particu­larly when they could do so without forfeiting the possibility of finding numer­ous partners for extramarital sex.

The Church’s doctrinal development during the reform period, combined with the proliferation of new law reflecting the views of the reformers and the revitalization of the study of canon law, must be understood in the context of the social changes resulting from population growth and urbanization, as well as the intellectual changes that flowed from an increasing knowledge of and fas­cination with the revived Roman law among the Church’s jurists.

The period of Church reform, moreover, coincided with the emergence of new ideas about the nature of emotional and physical relationships between man and woman, the set of notions that is sometimes described as courtly love.²⁸⁰ Again there seems to be a complex interconnection between the new ideas about love and the new order of marital and sexual relationships that re­sulted from the legal as well as the social changes of the reform period. Sexual doctrine and practice during the reform era represented the results of a com­plex interrelationship of conditions and causes.

Finally, theological understanding of traditional doctrines also underwent continual development during this period. Even the traditional Christian pic­ture of Jesus, which concentrated on his divinity and ignored his masculinity, was altered as a result of St. Anselms reinterpretation of the atonement. One result of this rethinking was a “sexualization” of the figure of Jesus in Christian devotional literature in the early twelfth century. The new style of devotional discourse found nothing incongruous in describing Christ metaphorically in terms of human sexual experience and in portraying Jesus as a lover who com­peted with other men for the affections of devout women (see, for example, Plate 15).^{[910] [911] Thus Anselmian atonement doctrine in the long run had the para­doxical effect of integrating Jesus into the emotional, affective world of the twelfth-century love poets. The new persona of the sexual Jesus had significant implications both for later twelfth- and thirteenth-century views of marriage and virginity; concepts of celibacy and married love were both affected by the new notions concerning the humanity of Christ.}

Up to 1140, however, the Church’s legal writers had yet to come to grips with one basic juristic problem: how to explain and how to deal with the puzzling discrepancies in traditional law about sexual relations. The compilations of the reform canonists, from Burchard to Ivo, clearly demonstrated the lack of consis­tency between the views of councils, patristic writers, popes, and other author­ities on virtually every major sexual issue that the canons dealt with. There was no coherent doctrine to account for the formation of marriage, for example, nor was there any unanimity of view on divorce and remarriage, on consanguinity, on impotence, on fornication, adultery, and other sexual crimes. Traditional canonists had collected divergent authorities, grouped together their teachings on various problems, and left the judge, pastor, or student to cope with the discrepancies as best he could. What was lacking was a synthesis that could give form, consistency, and coherence to canonistic tradition. That synthesis finally emerged about 1140 in the Decretum of Gratian.